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Messages - Grizzly

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1
VGMaps Social Board / Re: YouTube channel! (JonLeung1)
« on: January 05, 2024, 08:59:11 am »
I finished watching the Japan vlog series today. I liked them very much. Very great musical selection, so much content flowing together by the great editing and it was just so much fun to watch them. Thank you for creating this series. :)
I think day 10 was easily my highlight just by how the longer like-one-take interaction scenes made me feel as if I was there with you in these spots.

2
As written on vgmpf: SNSF you either have the choice to play the game and dump the memory of the SPC700 whenever it received the instructions to play a music track or you may be able to find the original 65816 CPU instructions inside the ROM module which fill the SPC700's memory and create an SNSF file for it. I think MINISNSF are basically the cpu instructions and samples once and the raw note data in all the small files.
Just by searching I didn't find any tool that automates the process of finding places in the ROM which interact with the SPC700. So getting this extracted seems like a lot of manual work and requires understanding of the 65816 CPU instructions to recognize patterns.

3
It has been discussed here: VGCartography - getting to work on PS1 maps! - but not in an own topic thread.

I still haven't looked further into it and how new games can be made available but it still looks very promising.

4
This is very great to hear. This should have fixed the upload issue, too, I assume, because it was all because of some GoDaddy post processing after upload for "security reasons"?  ::)

Oh, because I see it now in the other thread: The decoding of the database-stored post texts got wrong. It interprets the UTF-8-stored text as ANSI, resulting in outputting the special U+00C2 letter that denotes the begin of a two-byte long character.

The following character is to test what happens during encoding: .

5
VGMaps Social Board / Re: YouTube channel! (JonLeung1)
« on: March 06, 2022, 02:20:20 am »
I love the Monkey Island series, too. Your video has lots of great references. I also like that you explain them in the subtitles for those who didn't play the games.

I started playing the games around 1992 when I began attending school (in the afternoons after school, of course). I can't remember much about the two last games because they were play-once-forget-fast titles for me. So I kind of understand that they don't get much attention in the book. But I also think that it's a missed opportunity.

6
Gaming / Re: Nintendo Console History
« on: March 05, 2022, 11:06:34 pm »
The fact of being replaced after at least 6 years is quite interesting. If you ever decide this for handhelds, I'd like two replacement counts: 1. The time between release dates of previous handheld and successor, 2. The time between original handheld and first successor that wasn't backwards compatible to said handheld.

And well, the Switch basically replaced the handheld line, too. At least it felt that way to me as a New 3DS owner - seeing no new releases for years.

7
When I read about the promo video challenge, the first thing that came to my mind was an ancient promo video for the Speed Demos Archive created in August 2007 (News post): Speed Demos Archive Promo by Team Zwei (Youtube video)

It might not be the best promotional because the content it promotes is only briefly shown during the fly-by sequences and the composition feels closely tied to the creation timeframe but back in the day I was hooked on the project description and that it took 6000 lines of code to script the choreography. And when I read your start post I imagined that a promotional video for VGMaps might be equally difficult to pull off when a lot of map content would be shown in a video.

8
Hi, it's pleasant to hear from you all.

I lost interest in the manual mapping with Windows Paint when I saw how much time improvement one could get with some of these automatic stitching tools. But because I felt that it would be even greater when such a tool could automatically distinguish foreground and background planes (a thing that would have been handy for my ongoing Rayman maps because PS1 and MS-DOS emulators didn't support the switch to Background only as in other emulators), I started to work on creating an image processing program in Java. I dreamt of the perfect mapping helper, conveniently working on every operating system. But it was more difficult than I thought it would be, creating movement vectors of scenery parts and recognizing what part is (parallax) background, foreground map and sprites/HUD. After months of working on it whenever I had time I had nothing working. So it slowly phased out of my sight. And with it the whole mapping because I felt guilty doing anything manual stitching when I could have invested the same time into my mapping helper code.

Since then (2011/2012) I only play games for playing's sake. Creativity-wise I still do some programming now and then but mostly for parsing texts. When I recently saw that there is a TypeScript map viewer working directly in the browser, it felt like the future for animated/interactive maps and I thought of working with it but the whole technology stack is a big hurdle to overcome and I still haven't set up a development environment where I can compile and run such code.

The pandemic is very easy to bear for me because also before all this I didn't interact much with the outside world. My last cinema visit still has been Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom in June 2018. I wouldn't describe my previous years' behavior as anxiety but yet it is exhausting for me to talk with non-relatives (and also write, so I keep online live chats at a minimum, too). Now with the pandemic ongoing, I have new problems considering doing anything for fun at people hotspots because I would feel guilty for getting a corona virus infection for participating in a not-required activity - despite being vaccinated against. I accepted one dinner with work colleagues in December and there may be one Advent stroll event (outdoors booths) with my relatives and I already feel guilty just for telling that I might do it and maybe be responsible for another two weeks of pandemic. I can't remember doing any previous leisure activities in public for this year. Every single one was related to work, health or supplies. And private meetings also have been only with first-degree family members and their spouses.

In case I haven't told you yet, JonLeung, I like watching your Youtube videos. I even more enjoyed watching your convention vlogs for the impressions I last experienced live in 2000 (Expo 2000 ;)) if you don't count flea markets, but I also have a soft spot for all the little details and anecdotes in your book reviews.

9
The number 12 corresponds exactly to the number of newline characters in the Genesis index.htm. On Windows a new line is historically written with two bytes, \r\n, so the upload process most likely is converting the line endings to Unix style, removing 12 bytes.

Using binary transfer should help with this because it should exempt the file from any conversion (as does the Auto setting if it sees a file extension that normally corresponds to a binary file format; like .png).

The file replacement error also might have to do with the text processing and a hickup on certain special characters in the extended ASCII range. For example, Super Nintendo index.htm uses © (169), ® (174), ³ (179) and ÷ (247) while Genesis index.htm uses © (169), á (225), ï (239) and ü (252).
Here binary transfer should also help, or alternatively using the HTML replacement codes (e.g. á) and inserting them instead.
But binary transfer sounds more promising because as you said: the uploading process or server should not inspect the file at all but use it as is.

10
Map Requests / Re: find the game of the map in the big band theory
« on: July 14, 2021, 12:03:57 pm »
This reminds me of a cross stitch picture that hung on the wall of my grandmother's apartment. It looked so much like a videogame to me - but it wasn't one, just a coincidence because of the pixelation and theme.

11
Maps Of The Month / Re: 2009/04: Metroid Dread (DS) - JonLeung
« on: June 28, 2021, 11:02:13 am »
So that's why I had so many memories of a game that was just recently announced.
We have had maps for this game already for the last 12 years.

It will be even more fun to revisit the maps when the Switch game has been played through to see if there are any similarities to the DS imagining :D

12
Map Requests / Re: JonLeung's Requests
« on: May 16, 2021, 01:39:11 am »
While most Pac-Man stages look identically to the mapped stage 1, it also has the infamous final level 256 which looks half different. If it needs an extra map though is debatable because it is unbeatable, even with a map. :)

13
Maps In Progress / Re: Electromax - getting to work on PS1 maps!
« on: March 18, 2021, 12:41:38 pm »
Thank you for the thorough explanation. So it requires individual understanding of the level data format which a game uses.

Seeing the noclip.website, I really get interest to understanding what's going on there. The size of each individual game folder's program files in the noclip source repository still is immense at first sight but compared to starting from scratch with a complete viewer it might actually be feasible.

I will have a look at it, maybe first experimenting with a game for which the level data format is known.

14
Maps In Progress / Re: Electromax - getting to work on PS1 maps!
« on: March 18, 2021, 01:25:09 am »
Wow, 3D content. Very great that such games get maps now. Thank you very much.

I have been absent for some years. What kind of tools would I need to be able to fly around in the 3D geometry of a game? Is it game-specific or is there something that I could use for, e.g., every PS1 game because it depends on the emulator?

15
Maps Of The Month / Re: 2021/03: Lemmings (PC) - Revned
« on: March 14, 2021, 02:47:10 pm »
Many years ago I had the plan the combine the Lemmings maps with overlay spots where an ability has to be assigned as visual walkthrough. I only ever finished this approach for 3D Lemmings Winterland because it only had 6 levels (see Lemmings 3D Winterland - Visual Walkthrough.zip, start with l3dwint_index.htm).

For the complete Lemmings 1 I got sidetracked by the version differences, reading through multiple walkthroughs which had special solutions for many versions because of changed ability counts or slightly different level design. And then of course playing each of the many versions side by side, mapping them at an equal pace. I stopped at around level 10 of the Fun rating.

I really appreciate seeing the full map set for one version even without any extras like level names or ability figures.

Thanks, Revned. This game deserves the honor of Map Of The Month.

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